A San Diego Superior Court judge on Wednesday appeared inclined to reaffirm his initial ruling upholding a hotel tax to finance the convention center expansion after hearing arguments from opponents trying to convince him otherwise.

While Judge Ronald Prager decided to take more time before issuing his final ruling, his comments during yesterday’s hearing offered clear signals that he was leaning toward supporting the city’s position that a room tax approved last year by the city’s hotel owners was legal.

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On Monday, Prager had released his tentative ruling concluding that under both state and local laws, the city had the right to form a special district in which only hotel owners could vote on a tax to finance the $520 million expansion project.

The city derives that authority, in part, he said, from the decades-old Mello Roos Act, which for years has been used by local governments to form community facilities districts for financing schools or infrastructure, with the money spent to finance the project repaid through taxes paid by landowners in the district.

A two-thirds vote is required of the “qualified electors” in the district, which happened when hotel owners overhwemingly approved the room tax in a weighted vote, Prager said.

Attorney Cory Briggs, representing San Diegans for Open Government, argued that both state law, starting with Proposition 13, and the city charter demand that voters in such a citywide district be registered voters, not hotel owners.

Prager countered that the city does indeed have the power to craft a special district where the hotel owners, not the general electorate, are the ones qualified to vote.

“All your arguments are ignoring the special powers of cities to use the supremacy of Mello Roos in municipal affairs,” Prager said. “And that’s what’s been done in this case.”

At yet another point in the hearing, Prager commented that what the city had come up with in forming the district “seems to make logical sense. What they’ve done is completely proper under California law.”

While the city’s outside counsel, Michael Week acknowledged that the convention center district was a “novel application” of Mello-Roos, Prager said that didn’t matter.

“The city is free to define landowners as they see fit,” Prager said. “It hasn’t been done before but it doesn’t mean it’s violative of city law.”

At stake in the court case is the city’s ability to attract much bigger conventions that the current center is unable to accommodate and hold onto those that are outgrowing the bayfront facility, like Comic-Con. The city is hoping to open an expanded center by early 2017, but if Prager affirms his tentative ruling, opponents have promised an appeal, which would clearly delay the project.

Under the convention center expansion plan, guests in downtown hotels would be charged a 3 percent room surcharge, while those in Mission Valley and Mission Bay would pay 2 percent and in outlying hotels and motels, 1 percent.

“We are optimistic that the judge will consider the points we made today and uphold the voters’ right to approve any special tax,” Briggs said following the hearing. “If he doesn’t, we will file an appeal.”